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5 women authors to celebrate Valentine's Day with Feb. 11 reading
Love.
Authors from Shakespeare to Danielle Steel have written about this powerful, mysterious emotion, and now five women writers associated with West Virginia University’s Department of English will share their own work in honor of Valentine’s Day.
Their reading, “Love and Other Dislocations,” will be at 7:30 p.m. Monday (Feb. 11) at the Blue Moose Café on Walnut Street in downtown Morgantown. It is free and open to the public.
“Listening to any one of these writers would be a treat,” said event organizer Mark Brazaitis, an associate professor of English at WVU. “To hear them all read in one night – that’s an occasion for celebration.”
The authors are Gail Adams, Natalie Dobson, Ellesa High, Mary Ann Samyn and Ethel Morgan Smith.
Brazaitis said he expects the authors will offer “their best work, full of energy, insight, laughter and love.”
Adams, a revered professor now in her final semester at WVU, is the author of “The Purchase of Order,” a collection of short stories that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1985. More than 25 of her stories have appeared in literary journals, including The Kenyon Review and StoryQuarterly.
Dobson is one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from WVU’s young and flourishing Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program. The author of haunting, riveting prose, she is considered a writer to watch.
High writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and is the author of “Past Titan Rock: Journeys into an Appalachian Valley.” She is a member of the Lower Eastern Ohio Mekoce Shawnee and teaches American Indian literature, film and creative writing at WVU.
Samyn is the author of four collections of poetry: “Purr;” “Rooms by the Sea,” winner of the 1994 Kent State UP/Wick Chapbook Prize; “Captivity Narrative,” winner of the 1999 Ohio State UP/The Journal Prize; and “Inside the Yellow Dress,” a 2001 New Issues Press/Green Rose Selection.
Smith is the author of the nonfiction work “From Whence Cometh My Help: The African-American Community at Hollins College” and the widely reprinted essay “Come and Be Black for Me.” She is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Virginia Foundation for Public Policy and WVU.
Smith has been a du Pont scholar at Randolph-Macon Women’s College, Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tuebingen in Germany and a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Department of English
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